What Makes Marketing Persuasive

Essentially, all marketing needs to do to be effective is give people great, believable reasons to buy.

When people have great reasons to do something, they usually do it. The reasons aren’t necessarily only logical; they can be – and often are – emotional, as well.

If your business isn’t as successful as you’d like it to be, it means you’re not giving people persuasive enough reasons to buy.

So, what makes a persuasive reason to buy?

The Most Persuasive Reasons to Buy Your Products/Services

Q: “What are the most persuasive reasons for people to buy my products and/or services?”

A: This takes a bit more explaining 🙂

In a nutshell, it comprises 3 things – your target, your offer and your angle. Let’s take a closer look.

Step 1: You Shouldn’t Target Everyone

Q: “How can I persuade everyone?”

A: “You shouldn’t even try to persuade everyone. If you target everyone, you don’t attract anyone.”

Realistically, you can’t be the best choice for everyone. You can’t even be a great choice for everyone. You might be a decent choice for everyone, but even that’s quite unusual.

If you try to persuade everyone, you make so many compromises from everyone’s perspective that you won’t persuade anyone.

So, you need to focus on finding the best reasons for a specific group of people to buy your products and services. That is, you have to focus on your target customer.

Your target customer in this context doesn’t mean the same thing you’ve probably read about elsewhere.

The usual idea is to paint a very specific picture of a person who’s like a “poster version” of all the people you’re trying to attract.

It includes their name, age, address, hobbies, family details, religion, political views, and even a picture. Pretty much everything you can possible think of about a person.

However, when you’re considering what the best reasons are for your target customers to buy from you, having too many details can be very misleading.

The people you want to attract don’t have the same kind of family, for example, so you shouldn’t base your marketing on the assumption that they do (unless you actually focus on helping people with specific kinds of families).

Instead, you should develop a target customer (description of the kinds of people you primarily want to attract to your business) that only includes the aspects of the people that almost all of them share.

Then you can start to understand what the best reasons are for all of those people in your target group to buy from you – not just one specific person.

For example, if you help people grow their businesses, you provide quite a few positive results and positive emotions. They make more money. They can work less. They feel in control of their business. They can provide a better life for their family. They can spend more time with their hobbies. And much more.

Your help creates all those positive results. And your potential customers are likely happy to pay for them.

On the other hand, they’d be unlikely to get excited about the features. Forexample, the precise technology you use to deliver your products and services.

A positive result is a persuasive reason to buy what you sell. But it’s not enough to just point out some benefits – your competitors might say the same things.

Step 3: What Makes You Different

Q: “What makes people choose me over my competitors?”

A: “The aspects of your business that make you meaningfully different.”

Something has to make you different. Otherwise, your target customers might as well buy from one of your competitors.

Depending on what exactly you sell, the benefits of your product or service might be very similar to the ones offered by your competitors’ products and services.

So, you have to either find the unusual benefits you provide, or find another way to stand out from your competition.

Maybe you’re the only one in your field who offers a free trial of your service. Maybe you’re the only one to create a specific outcome or focus on a specific group. Maybe you use a different method to create results.

Something has to make you clearly different. But it only makes a real difference if it’s meaningful to your target customers. You can be different in countless ways, but if none of them is truly meaningful to people, why would they care?

Consider all the things that make you stand out from your competition and find the differences that your target customers care about.

Focus Your Marketing on The Most Persuasive Reasons

Your marketing leads to sales when it gives people good reasons to buy. So, focus your marketing on the most persuasive reasons. Why would you waste marketing on some mediocre reasons?

When you focus your marketing, you’re not only going to make more sales directly, you’re also going to be memorable. So, when people are ready to buy, they’ll remember what makes you different and better than your competitors.

Next time you catch yourself asking, “What colors shall I use on my website?” “What’s the right price for my product?” or “What’s the best marketing tactic?” – Stop!

Instead of those questions, ask, “What are the most persuasive reasons for my target customers to buy what I sell, and how I can get those reasons across?”

Those best reasons to buy from you make up your value proposition. If you’re not making the sales you’d like, then you’re not getting the ideas in your value proposition across clearly enough.

When you focus your marketing on your value proposition, people will understand why it makes sense for them to buy, and you’ll see the difference in your sales numbers.

Take a look at this exercise that helps you evaluate (with brutal honesty) the ideas you have, so you won’t waste any more of your marketing on ideas that don’t persuade people.

So, which of you old marketing questions are you going to stop asking, and which new questions will you be asking instead? Let me know in the comments below.

About Peter Sandeen

Peter Sandeen dreams of sailing with his wife and dogs on the Finnish coast-unless he's helping someone build a clear marketing message and strategy that creates sales consistently. Download the quick 5-step exercise that shows what ideas are most likely to make people want to buy your products and services.

Terrific read, especially the part “Sell the benefits, not the features.” So many sales pitches fall flat when the sellers muddle it up with talk of the latest whizzbang or doohickey features. All buyers care about is WIIFM: What’s In It For Me?

I agree that people often by for emotional reasons. Focusing on the logical is the wrong strategy.
It is also great advice to have a narrow focus. I think keeping a narrow focus is hard for many because we think we are losing out, but the result is the opposite.

Yep, people really often feel like they can’t narrow down their focus because they feel they’d “lose sales opportunities.” I guess that’s true in some sense, but at the same time, they’d still get far fewer sales opportunities.